Today's license changes and Unity

I agree it is Steve Jobs with an apparent distaste for games, not the whole of Apple. It's just that in Apple's case it's hard to separate the man from the company, at least in terms of the way the media reports it.

the_wandering_monster Wrote:Okay, this is a question borne out of multiple ignorances, and my bad if this is NDA'd, but... I've just read Gruber's coverage of today's change in the iPhone OS SDK license; I was already intending to roll my own 3D engine for uni,

That 3.3.1 paragraph seems to ban just about everything. SDL for iPhone? Clearly forbidden. Why? Any kind of layer, even any reusable utility units you make can easily be ruled under that paragraph. And for those of us working on other languages, they are explicitly forbidden!

â€œSo much for programming language innovation on the iPhone platformâ€ said Joe Hewitt, developer of the Facebook iPhone app. It sure sounds like it.

I hope that this is really all about killing off inefficient battery consuming tools like Flash, with clumsy, catch-all legalese, and that Apple will not care at all about our little cross-platform compatibility layers.

I agree with all three of you. My frustration is definitely pointed directly at the comment Steve Jobs made in this particular instance, not Apple as a whole. In fact, I should throw some kudos at the folks who tend the iPhone dev forums at Apple. I can tell they get frustrated with the situation at times too, even though they don't/can't display that.

That 3.3.1 paragraph seems to ban just about everything. SDL for iPhone? Clearly forbidden. Why? Any kind of layer, even any reusable utility units you make can easily be ruled under that paragraph. And for those of us working on other languages, they are explicitly forbidden!...

I don't see SDL being banned in any way. It is, as far as I know, just something written in C/Obj-C using Apple's documented API's.

As a "compatibility layer" SDL is totally forbidden. I think that is exactly the sort of thing that they are trying to ban. IMO the point of this whole charade is that they want people focused on the iPhone platform. The focus is probably for the UIs because they want to force people to keep close to the guidelines. The easiest and worst way to do that is to require them to use the official toolkit and tools.

The problem is that Apple is holding all the secret keys to make the best software. You can't use the APIs that they are allowed to use. You can't make software that fills a similar role to Apple's (if they decide that they don't want the competition). Implementing functionality similar to their apps (even at a superficial level) has lead to rejections as well.

At the same time they let so much shovelware on the iPhone that it's ridiculous. Bad terrible UIs diligently written in XCode with Cocoa, buggy apps that crash constantly, programs rife with memory leaks, etc.

Short answer is that I'm not very worried. Taken literally the terms could very well prevent any company that uses any scripting in their game from publishing to iPhone, and that would include many casual gaming mainstays like Popcap. I think Apple's going to have to backpedal a bit.

My biggest fear is that they'll selectively enforce the rule rather than clarify it. But again, I'm not that worried.

I think it can mean something different then the way I see you interpreting it.

If you look at it from the perspective of an outsider saying: "Apple is making a social gaming network and wants to be a giant with that by squeezing money out of everyone for using it," then Steve saying "there's no money to be made and no advantage to us to having a social game network" means something totally different than what you think.

To me it says they're not after making money off of it directly, and not trying to bully people into it because there's a big win for them if people use it.

Apple didn't make a social gaming network just because developers whined about not wanting to do the work. They did it because there clearly are "advantages" and "money" to be made from it. To me the advantage they do have by making their own is simply consistency. With one network instead of a bunch of scattered ones, and not one at all in most games, the end user is the winner. It doesn't directly increase Apple's bottom line, but it makes the gaming experience better.

Quote:The reason there is only ngmoco's Plus+ and OpenFeint is because no one but they have figured out any potentially viable way to earn money in a gaming ecosystem that you have completely screwed up. I don't just mean, "sort of", I mean *completely* screwed up. There is absolutely no way 99.9% of us game developers, be it indie or AAA will invest in your garbage ecosystem because we can't rely on anything going right in terms of economics.

You lost me, here.
Apple has completely screwed up the iPhone gaming ecosystem, because indie and AAA will not invest in it, because Apple introducing a social gaming network has screwed up the economics of ... ??

AnotherJake Wrote:Dude, Steve, have you ever seen what Microsoft has done with Xbox 360? Where is the source of this incredible density your mind has toward gaming?

Xbox was released in 2001, it operated at a loss until 2008.

Xbox's first profitable year after seven years was $426 Million, compared to Apple's profits on the iphone of $330 Million in 3 days, compare also to the $1.9 Billion loss the Xbox division posted the previous year.

2008 was also the year of the Xbox red ring of death situation, costing Microsoft $5 Billion dollars.

As of January 10,2010, 39 Million Xbox 360's have been sold world wide,
while Apple has sold 33.75 Million iPhones.

Where does Steve's density toward gaming stem from?
Well Steve worked at Atari, how many times has Atari gone bankrupt
in the thirty five years since? Everyone who has ever owned that company
has sold that company at a loss. He's been there, done that.

Also with all the free and $0.99 games on the iphone currently, with Apple receiving a paltry $0.30 per game, do you think Steve's looking at the bottom line and saying "yeah, games, thats where the money is rolling in?"
Hell no.

On games alone Apple would never make up for the investment they made in developing the App store, much less maintaining it.

@Najdorf

As far as Adobe goes, they've held a monopoly on the graphics market for ages.
However 'Macs are great for graphics', ie, "great for using Adobe products' is a cliche of the last century. While Apple was the golden child of the graphics industry they operated at a loss and almost went bankrupt.

My thirteen years of experience with the graphics industry is that they are all cheap pirates who would gladly hang on to five year old hardware as long as their currently pirated version of Adobe software works on it. I would never in my life dream of marketing or selling to that bunch of toothless hook handed bandits.

All the complaining I see here reminds me of October 23 2001 when I rattled off an angry e-mail to Steve Jobs after the "here's an iPod" keynote, it went something like "An Mp3 player? are you f'n crazy? Who the hell wants an MP3 player? The world wants Mac OS X in the palm of their hand with built in phone, a camera, and wireless network."

In the nine years since I've learned to have a little more faith in Steve's crazy chess game tactics. My prediction is this: iPad sales reach a saturation point, laptops and iMacs become more iPad-ish, Apple then reveals that 100% of iPad/iPhone software works natively on all current/new Macs, meaning that there is 250,000 or more applications you can purchase for your Mac through the App Store and Apple sees a percentage of each sale.

Compare this now to the last thirty years of software sales history.
Take Adobe alone. Adobe achieved $1.23 Billion in revenue in 2001.
(not bad considering all those pirates)

Apple didn't see a penny from that, yet they got stuck with the research development and marketing costs to get the machines out to industry so Adobe could see dime one.

Under the App Store future, Apple potentially licks up $369 million from those kind of sales.

Although right now looking at the stock price and company value, Apple could buy Adobe outright with their pocket change.

As the iPhone marketplace puts the hurt on Adobe, their profits and stock value will continue to decline, making them even less relevant than they are.

Skorche Wrote:As a "compatibility layer" SDL is totally forbidden. I think that is exactly the sort of thing that they are trying to ban.

I can't see how that's possible - SDL is just a bunch of C+Obj-C code regardless if it makes the same API available for other platforms. As long as the iPhone target is statically linked and does things the iPhone way they can't possibly have a problem with that - if they do, then my own C+Obj-C game framework/template falls under the same rules and I might as well give up right now. Anyone using Cocos2D or SIO2 or even Apple's Xcode templates should give up too!

Yeah, but none of those are "compatibility layers". That's sort of the problem with their ridiculously over generic wording. It's not only targeting Adobe whom they've suddenly decided that they hate so much (do to flash?) but everybody else too.

They probably don't plan on enforcing it beyond another way to weed out apps that they inconsistently decide are not worthy of their platform. Fart apps are great, fart apps using ActionScript are the spawn of Satan.

Skorche Wrote:That's sort of the problem with their ridiculously over generic wording.

I guess that's the crux of it - if they take "compatibility layer" literally then any iPhone game that's a port from another platform or has been ported to another platform is in violation. Unless it's rewritten from scratch - which is just dumb.

FreakSoftware Wrote:You lost me, here.
Apple has completely screwed up the iPhone gaming ecosystem, because indie and AAA will not invest in it, because Apple introducing a social gaming network has screwed up the economics of ... ??

Sorry, I was mad and rambling, continuing the thoughts I had from earlier, trying to read too deeply into his motivation for saying such a stupid thing in the first place.

Look, the bottom line is that he's no friend to game developers. If I had any doubts about that before, they've been completely removed at this point.

Lots of interesting discussion in this thread. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet...

@ igame3D: Those are all pretty good points. I still think he's wrongly being a jerk about it.

Quote:Also with all the free and $0.99 games on the iphone currently, with Apple receiving a paltry $0.30 per game, do you think Steve's looking at the bottom line and saying "yeah, games, thats where the money is rolling in?"

Well, but in my opinion, a lot of the pricing debacle is actually Apple's fault, so I think that argument hits right at the center of things. What you're presenting is the picture I think he sees, but the picture a lot of us out here see is that it's like that because they've crippled so many of our avenues for marketing our products. If you're a paid iPhone developer you can read countless posts on their dev forums about how Apple has really made things miserable for developers on that front.

To me, and many others, it looks like Apple has very little interest in the quality of apps on the iPhone or whether anyone is successful or not. Instead, it looks like all they want are as many apps as they can and to see tens of thousands of developers clamoring to be on iPhone. I think it's ridiculously stupid for them to present that attitude. Why crap on the developers? Why not actually take care of the developers instead? Why not treat them with a little respect? Would that really hurt them somehow?

Also, as a personal observation: still can't browse for any other software on the iPad except for:
In the Spotlight
New and Noteworthy
... six other games here ...
What's Hot

It's been over a week now since we hustled to get our junk out there on time for the "grand" opening. Apple has like 25 billion dollars in cash. I have like a lot less than that. I just submitted an update to make my software better. I wish they could figure out how to hire people to make their software better too.